Reviews, Recipes, and Random Slices of Life

For the last part of 2016, I was posting three good things daily on Facebook. It helped my mood, and it helped me notice good things despite stress and sickness. I wanted to keep doing something like this. The plan is to post 10 good things weekly on Monday. This one is a little late. Oops!

The kids went back to kindergarten and preschool on Tuesday! This was a surprise, because my calendar had contradictory information so I was braced for a whole 'nother week of them both being home all day long. Surprise!

1. Theia was happy to go to preschool. Hopefully this means the long break has allowed her to forget that she was not wanting to go for a while.

2. I got summoned for jury duty! This has never happened before. I'm excited.

3. Cardinals in winter. Worst camouflage. Best bird-watching. The certified urban wildlife habitat beside Cassius' school bus stop has three or four pairs of cardinals living in it or nearby, so I often see them flying across the street, perching on snow-covered branches, and otherwise being photogenic.

4. Phil got me a new battery for my laptop. He used some of his Amazon reward from work to help *me* do my work. :) Now I'll have more than 10 minutes of battery life again. Such luxury!

5. I got the My Little Ponies of the Apocalypse t-shirt that I ordered as my reward for hitting a weight loss benchmark (thanks, pneumonia!). The kids think the t-shirt is of pirate ponies.


6. I finished the final draft of my high fantasy novella, "The Unkindness of Ravens," and submitted it to Tor.com. Yay! That is the most rewritten piece I've ever created. It's about 29,000 words long, and only about 10,000 of those words are from the story I started with when I decided to do this. And there I was, thinking that all I would need to do was change the beginning and ending a bit and add a few thousand words. Ha.

7. Chuck Sambuchino of Writer's Digest contacted me out of the blue, to ask MinnSpec to spread the word about the 2017 Minnesota Writing Workshop. I enjoy reading his blog, so that was pretty cool! Also, for pity's sake people. Have a website, and put a contact form on it!

8. I went back to the gym for more than just the sauna! It's been a while because The Sickness meant I couldn't breathe well enough to exercise. Saturday I did a yoga class, and it felt great.

9. First sale of 2017--a reprint sale of an eco-horror short story to an upcoming anthology. Huzzah reprint sale!

10. I started Project: Clean All The Things. Picking up went on my Not-To-Do List while I was cramming to get "Unkindness" finished, so I promised I'd spend the first two weeks after finishing it using my regular writing time to CLEAN (and catch up on emails).

Yesterday, cvalenti* opened up my computer and prepared to install the new power source to make my computer capable of booting up again.

Alas, it turns out that the problem was not the power source, but the CPU fan. So we ordered the part and it should be here by UPS soonish. Unfortunately, then my computer decided to stop staying on or booting up.

Laptop docking station to the rescue! My laptop is now hooked up to the docking station balanced on top of my defunct desktop computer, all surrounded by a nest of cords that must be seen to be believed. I'd take pictures, but the place where I organize my photos away to is currently out of it.

All this so that I can continue to work from home on a day job project, and also so that I can do writingy stuff. (The amount of typing I do, working at my desk with a real keyboard that's at the right height and a real monitor likewise is pretty essential.)

* On the entertaining side, I did feed cvalenti a meal in which everything had vegetables in it: broccoli and onions in the chicken divan; zucchini, squash, cucumber, and green beans in the "seasonal vegetable"; and fennel in the cake**.

** Which was very tasty, being a banana-fennel cake the documentation of which will occur eventually (with pictures).

04/30/2009 - full work, but there were a couple of beautiful hours of downtime.
* Posted writing log.
* penthius freewriting about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/us/30zodiac.html?ref=us
* Updated market list from my Gmail to-do labels.
* Updated submission order for "Charity From a Thief," "The Radiator Burped," "Road of Dreams," "A Phoenix By Any Other Name," and "The Miracle Material" and picked where they're going to next--not necessarily the market that pays the most, but the new market that pays well and is what I think is a really good fit. Given the choice between an older magazine and a newer one, I sub to the newer one on the theory that their slush pile is smaller.
* Processed Dead Bait Anthology's very nice form letter rejection of "Miracle Material." Le sigh.
* Read Critters newsletter and various mid-week ad mailings from my writing newsletter people.
* Submitted "The Miracle Material" to Shock Totem after much wailing and gnashing of teeth over OpenOffice's difficulties with, it seems, the very notion of the .RTF format. (More on that later--the quick answer is "AbiWord.")

What on earth did writers with day jobs do before there were decent-sized thumb drives?

I have an ancient and very crotchety computer. A number of years ago, when we were still on dial-up, I turned off Automatic Update because it just crashed the internet connection every time I tried to use it. Now I am trying to clean up the computer and install all the updates and make it pretend to work (OpenOffice and other programs crash way too often--only on this computer, too, not on my laptop).

36 out of 37 updates went smoothly, until it tried to install a security update for Microsoft .NET framework, version 1.1 Service Pack 1. Then it went bad, with a "Failure to Delay Load Library mscorlib.dll Win32 error: 32" message. I'm not even sure I have this .NET framework, but I've got no idea how to tell. The Microsoft support site is useless, unless I want to pay several hundred dollars to actually get a personal response (I don't). Grumble. Grumble grumble. I bought the damn operating system; I think I should get some honest-to-goodness tech support included with that!

Oh, well. Ignoring the update and moving on.

Next up: installing CCleaner, cleaning off some of the crap, and then running a nice long defrag. Then reinstalling OpenOffice and seeing if it will stop with the crashing.